Type and structure of an object in R

Structure of an object in R

Sometimes, we have to identify the type of the objects that we use in R. It can be useful for unit testing, to check if our data can be processed.

Thankfully, R have native advanced features to validate data format. Here are some essential features for object analysis in R.

Get the type of an object in R

Else if the R language is tolerant, sometimes we need to get the type of an object. For example, for a data frame, here is the result that we can obtain.

class(myDataframe)
[1] "data.frame"

The class() function return a response as a character type that we can use on our scripts.

Length of an object in R

The length of an object can be used to find the number of repetitions on a loop. You just have to use the length() function. Here is an example:

length(myList)
[1] 228

The length() function return an integer with the number of elements on our list. We can use the result of this function on our script.

Object name in R

In R, your objects can have their own name. For example, on a data frame or on a list, the elements can be identified by a name or an ID. To verify the name of an element, we can use the names() function. Here is an example:

names(myDataframe)
[1] "myID" "First name" "Last name" "Age" "City"

This function return a character vector that you can use on your R scripts.